Australia shaken by earthquake before levelling series against Black Caps

Listen to this article:

Australian captain Aaron Finch was woken by an earthquake on Friday morning before starring in a T20 win over the Black Caps that evening. MARK TANTRUM/GETTY IMAGES

Australia’s touring T20 side have dealt with plenty while in New Zealand over the last month.

After two weeks in quarantine, the first thing Aaron Finch did was attend a memorial service for the 185 killed in the Christchurch earthquake a decade ago.

Then came New Zealand’s ferocious swing attack and Martin Guptill’s power hitting to leave them 2-0 down in the series.

At the halfway point of the tour, Australian cricketers were thinking of doing the unthinkable – boycotting a trip to Auckland and Eden Park – to avoid another spell in quarantine on the way home.

Then a new Covid-19 lockdown was ordered, rejigging the entire tour, locking crowds out of two matches and keeping the players in Wellington for nine days.

On Friday, before Australia levelled the series that night, came a peak to the tumultuous tour.

At 2.29am local time, Finch and most of his teammates were stunned by a massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck off the east cape of North Island.

“Absolutely I woke up, I had no idea what happened,” he said.

“My room was shaking. I thought I was having a dream. I got up, I stood up and I didn’t really know what to do.

“A couple of guys might have run straight to the fire exit and straight down to reception.”

Earthquakes are relatively commonplace in New Zealand and dealing with them comes somewhat naturally to locals.

However, this one was a biggie with more Kiwis reporting they had felt the tremor to monitoring agency GeoNet than for any previous earthquake.

What followed next was a flurry of early morning text messages and reassurances that everything was going to be OK.

“The doctor was on the phone pretty much straight after – (it’s) probably more alarming than anything that he’s on the phone at 2.30 pumping out tweets and texts,” Finch said.

“He reassured all the boys that everything was OK so everyone was in good spirits.

“It was a bit of a conversation piece in the morning.”

Array
(
    [post_type] => post
    [post_status] => publish
    [orderby] => date
    [order] => DESC
    [update_post_term_cache] => 
    [update_post_meta_cache] => 
    [cache_results] => 
    [category__in] => 1
    [posts_per_page] => 4
    [offset] => 0
    [no_found_rows] => 1
    [date_query] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [after] => Array
                        (
                            [year] => 2023
                            [month] => 12
                            [day] => 29
                        )

                    [inclusive] => 1
                )

        )

)

No Posts found for specific category